Quotes About Poetry

and you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover

Porque una sabia disposición de la naturaleza ha determinado que nuestro espíritu moderno casi pueda prescindir del lenguaje: las expresiones más comunes bastan, ya que ninguna expresión basta; por eso la conversación más vulgar es a menudo la más poética, y la más poética es precisamente la que no se puede escribir. Por esas razones dejamos aquí un gran espacio en blanco, lo que es señal de que el espacio está repleto.

The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.

La libertad intelectual depende de cosas materiales. La poesía depende de la libertad intelectual. Y las mujeres siempre han sido pobres, no sólo durante doscientos años, sino desde el principio de los tiempos.

Era amore, si disse […] amore che non cercava mai di afferrare il suo oggetto; ma, come l'amore che i matematici portano alle formule, o i poeti alle loro frasi, era destinato a diffondersi su tutto il mondo e a diventare parte della ricchezza umana.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her fore-runners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

Szerelem ez, gondolta Lily, ahogy mintha vásznával bíbelÅ'dött volna, párolt és lesz?rt szerelem; szerelem, mely tárgyát megragadni sosem akarná; szerelem, amit matematikusok éreznek képleteik, költÅ'k verssoraik iránt, és mintha az lett volna a célja ennek a szerelemnek, hogy a világon szétoszolva az emberüdv része legyen.

How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry.

In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.

hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)...

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane...

a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink 'v' in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering 'l.' Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.

in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.

Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce's poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas

Stilletos of a frozen stillicide [...] In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word. My dictionary defines it as 'a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop.' I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Line

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze..." I wrote back telling Liza that her poems were bad and she ought to stop composing. Sometime later I saw her in another cafe, sitting at a long table, abloom and ablaze among a dozen young Russian poets. She kept her sapphire glance on me with a mocking and mysterious persistence.

and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.